A look at Michael Thorbjornsen

Michael Thorbjornsen is one of the best golfers to come out of Massachusetts. Last spring, he earned his PGA Tour card as the top-ranked player in the 2024 PGA Tour University after an incredible career at Stanford that included three wins, a Pac-12 Player of the Year Award (2023), two Ping All-America First Team (2023 and 2024), and one Ping All-Amerca Second Team (2022) selection.

Before heading to Stanford, he won the 2018 U.S. Junior Amateur, beating Akshay Bhatia in the championship match at Baltusrol CC.

Thorbjornsen, who was raised in Wellesley, boat-raced the Mass Amateur field in 2021 at Brae Burn CC. He beat fellow USGA champion Matt Parziale 8&6 in the final match. Later on that summer, he won the Western Amateur, one of the biggest amateur events in the country.

As an amateur, Thorbjornsen performed well in professional events. He finished fourth in the 2022 Travellers the week after competing in the U.S. Open at The Country Club. He’s played in three U.S. Opens, qualifying for two of them and earning an exemption in 2019 as the U.S. Junior Amateur champion. He made the cut in 2019 at Pebble Beach, the first U.S. Junior Am champ to compete on the weekend.

However, Thorbjornsen’s senior fall in 2023 was hampered by injuries. He missed the 2023 U.S. Amateur and Walker Cup due to a stress fracture in his back and ankle surgery. Brentley Romine reported on the ankle surgery, which “removed a loose bone and repaired a tendon that was keeping his foot from properly supinating.”

Yikes.

In the end, Thorbjornsen held off Christo Lamprecht for the top spot in PGA Tour University, earning his PGA Tour card. He played on the PGA Tour throughout the summer and fall of 2024 and earned $1.2 million. He finished runner-up in the John Deere Classic last July and recorded one other top-ten, an 8th-place finish in the Sanderson last October.

However, a mediocre fall season, which also included a knee injury that caused him to withdraw from the Black Desert Classic in October, has spilled into an uninspiring spring for Thorbjornsen. He’s currently ranked 198th in the Official World Golf Rankings (OWGR) and 207th in Data Golf rankings. The Data Golf model includes LIV Golf player results in LIV events.

A quick look at Thorbjornsen’s Strokes Gained Pentagon for 2025 is not great. Each ring represents 50 players, so the closer a player is to the edge of the circle, the better he is in that particular statistic.

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